[kiiski]

I can't speak for Spanish, but in at least in Finnish there wont be confusion, because pronouns are used to refer to the previously named/described person:

"A man went missing last night. He was wearing a red shirt." "Mary had a vacation last month. She travelled to Spain."

Of course there could be situations where the description doesn't tell you the persons gender, but those are rare and the gender likely didn't matter anyway (as otherwise it would have been stated). Plus since you don't need to use gendered words, no one will know even if you mistake a woman for a man or vice versa.

[solve]

Is anaphora-resolution really always as simple as attaching to the most recent person, in Finnish?

I'd bet it's not always that simple, in any spoken language.

[kiiski]

I guess there may be some other cases that I can't think of, but the point remains the same; using the same pronoun for "he" and "she" (and "it" in spoken language) doesn't really cause confusion, because that's how the language works. People have been speaking it without having separate pronouns for a long time, and the language has evolved accordingly.

I took a look at a few of the top articles on Helsinki times right now (yes, those don't represent the spoken language very well, but I doubt it matters for this purpose) and some of their top comments. In the articles themselves almost every instance of "hän" (=he/she) referred to someone who had been described or named in the previous sentence. Only in one occasion the person was named in the previous paragraph (there were no other people named in between). In the comments there were some cases with no name/description, but they were commenting on a story about a person (unabomber in this case), so there was no ambiguity there.